Chapter 204:


    He looked around for something else to destroy. His eyesnded on the desk.


    Sitting there, in a ce of honor she had cleared for it months ago, was a model airne — hand-carved balsa wood, delicate and beautiful, with the words To my Star painted on the wing. She had spent weeks making it for Effie.


    Kaiden grabbed it.


    “No,” she whispered. “Kaiden, please. That’s for your sister.”


    He held it up, a cruel grin spreading across his face. “Effie is stupid. She doesn’t need toys.”


    He threw it — not dropped it, but hurled it with force against the hardwood floor.


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    Crack.


    The sound was sickening. The delicate wings snapped. The fusge splintered into pieces.


    She stared at the wreckage.


    Something inside her chest mirrored that sound. Not a snap — a quiet, final disintegration. Thest thread of obligation. Thest memory of his small hand in hers. Thest hope that he might yet be saved from his parents’ influence.


    Gone.


    Kaiden stomped on the pieces. “Stupid! Ugly!”


    She stood up slowly. The room was silent except for his ragged breathing and the sound of wood crunching under his sneaker.


    She didn’t yell. She didn’t cry.


    She looked at him — really looked at him. She saw the shape of his eyes, Belle’s eyes. She saw the curl of his lip, Grayson’s lip.


    “You are just like them,” she said. Her voice was stripped of all feeling. It was dead.


    Kaiden stopped stomping. He stared at her, thrown by herck of reaction. He had expected screaming. He had expected pleading.


    He didn’t know what to do with ice.


    She knelt and reached under the desk to retrieve the fallen sketchbook. She clutched it and the others to her chest.


    She walked to the pile of splinters that had been abor of love, and stepped over them.


    “Tell your father,” she said, without looking back, “that this was thest time he will underestimate me.”


    She walked out of the study. She passed Kaiden, who had ttened himself against the wall, sensing a shift in the atmosphere he couldn’t name.


    She walked into the elevator.


    As the doors closed, she heard it begin — a wail rising from the apartment. Fake, theatrical, designed to summon sympathy.


    She leaned her head against the cool metal wall. The elevator descended.


    Her vision began to tunnel. ck spots bloomed at the edges. The fever, reignited by the stress and the pain, was consuming her from the inside.


    Just get to the car, she told herself. Just get to the car.


    The doors opened. She stumbled into the lobby. Ralph said something, but his voice reached her as though through water.


    She pushed through the doors into the rain.


    She made it to the car. She wrenched the door open and copsed into the driver’s seat. She tried to fit the key into the ignition. Her hand wouldn’t obey. It fell to herp.


    The darkness rushed in from all sides.


    Effie, she thought.


    And then, nothing.


    “Isolde!”


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